Your Right to Know

Gov. John Kasich’s school-funding plan attempts to reduce the wide gaps in spending among poor
and wealthy school districts while calling for a sweeping expansion of the state’s tax-funded
voucher program for low-income students.

The $15.1 billion, two-year education plan would increase state aid to schools by 6 percent
in the coming school year, and 3.2 percent the next.

Administration officials stressed that under the plan no school district would receive less
state aid than it did this year. That means a number of districts will remain on what is known as a
“guarantee” – meaning they get more money than the formula otherwise says they should get.

“That is a huge expense and something that can’t be sustained,” said Richard A. Ross, Kasich’s
director of 21st Century Education. “But we’re willing to try to wean our schools off that
dependency.”

During a conference call this morning with reporters, Ross added: “We came to realize that
funding is really not about operating schools. It’s about educating our boys and girls,”

The overall goals, he said, are to push resources for success everywhere – rewarding good ideas,
providing flexibility for schools – and creating a “high-performance culture.”

“In everything we do, dollars are going to be driven from back-office administrative services
to the classroom,” Ross said.

Kasich is outlining his long-promised plan to school superintendents and charter-school
operators this afternoon in Columbus and will host a virtual town-hall about the proposal tonight
from COSI.

The governor’s proposal would create a $300 million “Straight A Fund” to provide districts
with one-time grants to support initiatives aimed at improving teaching and learning and driving
more funding to the classroom. It also will provide schools with $90 million to pay for tutoring
and intervention services they are required to provide youngsters reading below grade-level under
the newly enacted 3rd-grade reading guarantee.

Kasich wants to address the ongoing disparity problem among Ohio schools, where 20 mills of
property tax can raise from $900 to more than $14,000 per pupil, depending on the property wealth
of the district.

The state requires every district to levy a minimum 20 mills of local property taxes. For
that 20 mills, Kasich’s formula will use state money to bring all districts to a level of funding
equivalent to $250,000 of property value for each pupil.

Only 24 districts in the state -- including Upper Arlington, Grandview Heights and New Albany
-- currently have property values higher than that.

In addition, Kasich is calling for separate equity funding for poorer districts that
resembles parity aid, which had been part of school-funding formulas for much of the first decade
of the 2000s.

Districts would be ranked from poorest to wealthiest based on property and income, with the
poorest districts getting 15 mills worth of additional funding, an amount that steadily reduces to
5 mills for districts at the 80th percentile.

“It gives us a fairly equal base to build on meeting the needs of our individual students,”
said Barbara Mattei-Smith, Kasich’s assistant policy director for education. “A lot of our effort
is to set a base that reduces that disparity, so that ensures all of our students have an
opportunity for success.”

A new voucher program would provide private-school tuition starting next fall to any entering
kindergartener with a household income less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level – about
$46,000 a year for a family of four. Vouchers would be worth up to $4,250 a year and could be used
at the parent’s choice of participating private schools, which could not charge tuition on top of
the voucher amount.

The following year, vouchers would be expanded to students in kindergarten and first grade,
and, presumably, so on. The governor’s plan provides $8.5 million for vouchers the first year, and
$17 million, the next.

Currently, nearly half of the 1.8 million students in Ohio’s primary and secondary schools
come from families that would meet the income level to get a voucher. A separate figure on how many
incoming kindergarteners would be eligible is unavailable.

Although the setup is different, 15,702 students currently receive vouchers under Ohio’s
EdChoice scholarship program, which is available to any student who otherwise would attend a
low-performing public school.

The governor also is calling to lift many state mandates to give schools more flexibility and
allow them to focus on preparing students for college and career. For instance, districts could
base their school calendar on minimum hours, not days, and they would no longer be required to pay
$6.50 per child to their Educational Service Center for services, but pay only for services they
chose, if any.